Reversible Urban Practices: A Brief Interview With Jan Vormann
A pair of weeks ago, in the context of a workshop organized by Design Hub Barcelona, I had the chance to talk a bit with Jan Vormann, Berlin-based artist whom I already knew because of his project Dispatchwork, which consists in filling holes in the walls with lego bricks. I really appreciate the practice as […]
I, Eyes And JR
This post is written as a conversation with ‘Pop-Up City As Museum’ by Alexandra Mientjes and ‘New York’s Underbelly’ by Anna Triboli. The champion of ‘the street is my gallery’ and large-scale in-your-face projections of the ‘hidden’ urban moments and emotion, JR , is the winner of the TED Prize 2011. He began his journey […]
The Migration Of Mel And Judith
Architect Thomas Hillier has created a fantastic miniature world based on the story of Melvin and Judith, a fictional couple from Croydon, England. Mel and Judith, who are recently retired, have decided to give up on their life in London’s third City and travel Europe with their caravan. During their search for a good place and a […]
New York’s Underbelly
One of the projects I would undoubtably pay to see is the Underbelly Project, one of the greatest urban art operations undergone in the past years. The idea was born back in 2009 from two artists, Workhorse and Pac, who discovered a long time abandoned and incomplete subway station beneath the streets of New York […]
Picard's Gourmet Frozen Food Store
The French have some issues. Should the comfort and ease of the modern fast food culture be accepted, or should they stick to the habits of the traditional French kitchen? Of course, the French gastronomical tradition is of high standards, but specifically in big cities the pace of life speeds up, and the urban dweller […]
Augmented Foraging With Boskoi
Everywhere in the world you can find plenty of remarkable fruits, vegetables, mushrooms and herbs in the wild. Not only in the forests of Africa, but also in metropolitan areas around the world an enormous variety of edible species can be found. Boskoi is a new open source project that aims to unlock the collective […]
Chewing Gum As A Painter's Canvas
Today we found a very extraordinary form of street art. In order to make the pavements of London a bit more colorful, Ben Wilson, a local artist, started to use discarded chewing gum as a canvas and turn these into little paintings. For the past six years, Wilson has created more than 8,000 artworks on […]
The Concept Crèche For Urban Dogs
Building a career, having a social life, staying in a good shape and drinking a beer from time to time is already a hard job. But combining all these personal ambitions with raising children or pets is beyond human capabilities. Nevertheless, with a little help from the crèche, children still get raised in cities. Owning […]
DIY Culture In The Disconnected City
On Saturday afternoon, after the Salamanca Markets have packed up for another week, Hobart can be very quiet. Tourists have departed in their campervans to explore Tasmania’s delights, while residents have fled the city centre for their comfortable suburban homes on Hobart’s outskirts. In a derelict building, next to an ugly asphalt wasteland (home to […]
Mission Impossible?
MINI launches a mobile virtual game of car hunting in the inner city of Stockholm.
Dead Drops: The Offline File-Sharing Network
Aram Bartholl created an anomymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space by 'injecting' USB flash drives into publicly accessible walls, buildings and curbs.
Neighborfood. Check!
The Swedes seem to be on the sustainable go. Just as the dust has landed on last week’s news about switchboard artwork, another idea popped in the media yesterday by a student called Luong Lu for Vattenfall, one of Europe’s biggest energy providers. It’s about a simple way of saving energy by sharing food with a […]
On Seditious Cities
The big word these days seems to be ‘sedition’. In India, the right wing political organisations and a part of the national media are asking for ‘sedition’ charges to be clamped on Syed Ali Shah Geelani and Arundhati Roy in the context of an apparently anti-national speech at a meeting on justice for Kashmir, while a Fox News editorial argues for […]
iPad Graffiti
Along with their colleagues of new media agency BERG, communication office Dentsu London has developed a way to draw moving three-dimensional typographies and objects with an iPad similar to light graffiti, a theme we covered earlier on this blog. In dark environments, they played movies on the surface of the iPad that make 3D light […]
London’s Cycle Super Highways Get Barclays Blue
Worldwide governments have to economize, which generally means there will be less money to spend on the city's public spaces. Here on Pop-Up City we are very much interested in new financing strategies concerning public space. Would it, for instance, be possible to give world-leading brands the opportunity to invest in public spaces while giving them some brand visibility in return? Usually only talking about such an idea leads to angry faces and automatic defending mechanisms. Generally, brand involvement is considered something bad in the urban planning community. It seems to be completely normal that local governments sell all empty walls for advertisement space in order to earn some extra money, while at the same time it is not done to ask brands to get involved in public space design... even when the community could get something worth-full in return.
